A quick scratch for a big itch

The ongoing protests in Brazil may appear to have come out of nowhere, but the grievances have been building for some time. Despite the co-optation Brazil`s historically strong labor and social movements into the framework of the ruling Worker`s Party, issues such as public transportation, health, education, police violence and public transportation have been kept in the public consciousness by smaller groups of activists and a growing alternative media. There are Popular Committees for the World Cup in all of the host cities that have kept the embers of discontent burning in public consciousness. The deteriorating condition of urban infrastructure and services has been exacerbated by the spending of public billions to create a heard of shiny white elephants. The World Cup was part of a larger promise of continued economic growth that would raise consumer capacity and living standards for all Brazilians. Only the first part of this promise was completed. The decision to raise bus fares on the eve of the Confederations Cup was the spark that lit a larger fire.

Brazil is an overwhelmingly urban country that has a fascination with the car. This is a bad combination. One of the federal government’s principal development strategies has been to stimulate the automobile industry to the detriment of public transportation. There are no rail networks connecting any major cities in Brazil. The Metro systems of São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro have a combined length of 120.4 km that have to service more than 30 million people. The city buses are dangerous, expensive, and uncomfortable and are the only mobility option for those who live outside of city centers. The increase in fares that set off the larger protests throughout the country have to do with issues of urban governance, corruption, collusion, incompetence in urban management and the fundamentals of the Brazilian democratic system. When people take to the streets to voice their grievances it is a sign that they have exhausted their democratic channels. The violent police reaction to these protests signals a series of other problems with Brazilian democracy.

The Brazilian president has tried to calm nerves by announcing a series of “reforms”. Among these are a R$25 billion urban mobility proposal and a willingness to meet with social movements. The announcement of these measures as “new” is an indication of their previous absence. Wasn’t urban mobility at the very core of the World Cup and Olympic spending? Weren’t these events supposed to open paths of social inclusion for all Brazilians? Clearly the president’s move in this direction is welcome, but tells us that the opportunity to use the World Cup and Olympics to attend to the basic infrastructure needs of Brazilian cities has been wasted. It is a tacit acknowledgement that the government has failed to communicate with its nominal base and is now scrambling to explain why. With the slowing of Brazilian economic growth and the twilight of an economic model based on unbridled consumption, the lost opportunities of the last decade are coming into sharper focus. 

Pornographic Brazilian Pornography

There was yet more death and mayhem on the streets of Rio as another cyclist was killed. This time (as opposed to the triathlete killed in Leblon) there will be no solidarity cycle and no collective gnashing of teeth  as the cyclist was working, delivering water and gas canisters along impossibly crowded streets in the Zona Norte. The second paragraph in the ever-sensitive O Bobo was dedicated to the traffic problems caused by the accident. An excellent mapping initiative that will register crimes committed against cyclists has come of these recent deaths, but Rio remains an insanely dangerous place to ride a bike.

Following the death in Leblon, O Bobo revealed that on average, Rio’s buses accumulate traffic fines like the Guarda Municipal collects crack addicts. One bus on the line that killed the triathlete had 136 infractions in four years.  There have been innumerable fawning media reports about Rio’s intelligent city project and the mayor has used his technological initiatives to hobnob with the global elite (really looking forward to that Clinton visit in December!). But what’s the point of having an expensive IBM monitoring system when all you can do is watch in HD the streets flood and people get killed by buses? A “smart city” doesn’t willfully place its citizens at risk and then spend millions to watch them suffer.

Way back in 2007 when no one outside of Rio knew the name Eduardo Paes, he was plugging away as Rio’s state secretary of sport and leisure as the city prepared for the Pan American Games. The Olympic Stadium was over budget, poorly placed, behind schedule and, surprise surprise, poorly constructed. It also took on the name of a corrupt and disgraced former FIFA president. The stadium, like its declining namesake, has been closed for business because the roof is about to fall down. It has likely been in this condition for some time and the public has been at risk for years. Paes explained the other day that the stadium was constructed in a hurry  and that he was not at the head of the city government at the time so, hey, what can you do about the past? What exactly was Paes doing in his position of the state’s most important sporting institution when the stadium was constructed? If it is anything like the current secretary of Sport and Leisure, he likely gave nonsensical and offensive interviews with the intention of using the position as a political springboard. (Amber Alert: Marcia Lins).

Oh yes, because of old João’s peccadilloes with the ISL case and FIFA bribery he has not only had to resign from his honorary position at the IOC, but also at FIFA. The mayor-king has also given a green light for the changing of the Engenhão stadium name saying, “I’ve changed the name of a lot of things in Rio. I’ve changed them because I waned to. Botafogo has the naming rights and can call the stadium whatever it wants.” A little known fact is that Botafogo F.R. (who has the concessionary rights for a song) changed the name of the stadium years ago to Stadium Rio. Maybe we should change the name to Joana Havelange, João’s granddaughter who is one of the top people on the 2014 WC organizing committee, just to keep the black box clamped shut. More reasonably, there is a movement by several of Rio’s council people to put the name Nilton Santos on the Engenhão. Personally, I think the name Milton Santos would elevate geo-political consciousness a bit more (if you’re into geography porn).

In case all of this news didn’t excite you, here’s the money shot: After 63 years in the public domain, more than 750 million dollars of deforms in the last six years and a total dis-characterization of one of the world’s greatest sporting venues,  the Maracanã  has been privatized by the State of Rio de Janeiro. The winning consortium is comprised of IMX (Eike Batista’s main holding company that was contracted by the government to do the economic viability study), Odebrecht (Lula’s favorite civil construction firm), and AEG (a US based entertainment group that owns MLS teams and administers 120 stadiums around the world). The details of the concession are too painful to write down, but the rub is that over the next 35 years the state will receive less than 20% of its investment. I will be looking through this particular slice of this futuristic porn in the coming months but might not have the courage (or falta de vegonha) to write it down.

Riding on that Monster Bus!

Nearly every day in Rio there is a fatal accident involving public transportation. In response to the brutal gang rape of a USAmerican woman a few weeks ago the city government stopped all van service in the Zona Sul of Rio, massively impacting mobility options for residents of Vidigal and Rocinha, two of Rio`s largest favelas (not to mention the impact on those who make their living with the vans). One of the results of this short-sighted, band-aid solution is to overcrowd the dangerous bus system even more. Bus drivers wield their carriages like twenty-ton baseball bats, there is little to no regulation and even when drivers are fined for their egregious violations of law and common decency, the bus company will pay the fine to FETRANSPOR, a regulatory agency that acts on behalf of the bus companies. There is no projected reform of Rio`s transportation system underway, the federal government continues to subsidize car production and consumption in pursuit of the Brazilian Way of Life, and those whose lives fundamentally depend on public transportation will soon experience yet another increase to the already outrageously high fares.

Rio`s Mayor announced the increase in a meeting with Brazil`s finance minister. In the same breath he asked that Rio`s debt ceiling be raised from 40% of liquid receipts to 120%. Can anyone guess why Paes is asking to both increase transportation fares (that go to private companies) and asking to borrow more public money at the same time that huge areas of the city are being privatized, occupied by the military, and otherwise cleared for real-estate development? If anyone has been looking for the ghost of Margaret Thatcher, I think she had a cup of tea in the Malvinas and then hot footed it to Rio.

One of the more bizarre stories of recent weeks was the discovery of two arms floating off of Posto 9 in Ipanema. The arms were tied together with cords and the only thing the papers had to say about the case is that officials were going to figure out who they belong to. I have not been able to find anything more about this story but will try to give it some fresh legs.

Speaking of, one of the great initiatives in Rio is the development of the Transcarioca trail. This will (supposedly) unite between 160 and 220km of trails through Rio`s national, state and municipal parks. As with everything else, the idea is to have the trail ready before the World Cup. Let`s hope this project gets on the ground!

This weekend, the Novo Maracanã will open its doors to a limited public for a test game between the Friends of Bebeto and the Friends of Ronaldo, two members of the 2014 Local Organizing Committee. The privatization scheme has been big news here and there are numerous protests planned for the event. Tear gas mask, check. Eye drops, check. Running shoes, check.

The MAR and the mar

The Rio city government recently invested R$80.000.000 in the MAR, Museu do Arte do Rio. Mar is also the portuguese Word for ocean. To run the MAR, the city pays one million a month to Brazil’s biggest media company to run the museum and they still charge admission to city residents (though not on Tuesdays when it is open to everyone for free).  It is a lovely museum, perfectly situated in front of the cruise ship passenger terminal at Pier Mauá. In a future post we will take up some of the surprisingly progressive and interesting elements of the MAR. 

After a visit to the MAR, I left Flamengo to take some precious house guests to the international airport, some 24 kilometers distant. Just after hitting the road, the skies unleashed a Biblical torrent. The city closed down as nearly every important highway flooded, all public transportation came to a halt, trees crashed, power outed and the city reeled from surging sewage.

The body count was relatively low: 4 dead 2 1 missing. One of the dead was a Polish woman who had the temerity to lead against a light post in the Largo do Machado and died from an electric shock. She had just moved to Brazil with her husband.

In addition to the smaller roads in Catete, Gloria, and the typical inundation of Tijuca and the Praça da Bandeira, Avenida Brasil, the main east-west highway flooded at its strategic entracnce that brings together traffic flows from the south and from Niteroi. The meters` deep fetid stew completely engulfed cars and stranded traffic on all of the elevated highway system leading to the north and west of the city. There was no way forward and no way back. We were stuck without moving for three hours. A sign over the entrance to the bridge to Niteroi kept taunting us with a sign that flashed “Fluxo Bom” (good flow).

The brilliant idea of the city government is to take this elevated highway (which was the only option to get to the airport as trees had fallen over the access to the Santa Barbara tunnel, trapping cars inside), and put it below sea level as it runs alongside the port area. I have been railing against this idiocy from the beginning, but demolishing Rio`s port-area elevated highway to put it underground in a city that is prone to flooding is attaining lofty heights of quixotic skullduggery that not even my forked pen can reach.

Fortunately, I was in a car on my way to the airport after having spent a day at the museum. There were tens and hundreds of thousands who had worked long days, had crammed into non-air conditioned buses with no toilets, no way off, no food, no drink, and with no relief of the traffic in sight. My 24 km trajectory to the airport took 4 hours, something that I could have done with a kayak, paddleboard, skateboard, bicycle, or walking quickly.  Others didn`t get home until 3 or 4 in the morning only to get up and retrace their steps. Why is it that there is no plan to put public transportation to the international airport?

I desperately wanted someone to come by with their Euro-American clipboards to ask all of the people stranded in traffic or stuck in the metro or wading through sewage to ask which is the happiest city in the world…

The long and short of this post is that we have just spent 80 million to build a museum called MAR, but relatively nothing on dealing with water movement within the city itself. These are the kinds of perverse priorities or “unlucky realities” that don`t show up on the Mayor`s ill-conceived Monopoly game, but that have hugely negative impacts on the lives of Cariocas and visitors.